PLOS ONE (originally PLoS ONE) is an open accesspeer-reviewedscientific journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. It is the world’s largest journal by number of papers published. It covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. All submissions go through an internal and external pre-publication peer review, but are not excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field. The PLOS ONE online platform employs a "publish first, judge later" methodology, with post-publication user discussion and rating features.[1]

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded PLOS a $9 million grant in December 2002 and $1 million grant in May 2006 for its financial sustainability and launch of new free-access biomedical journals.[2][3] Later, PLOS ONE was launched in December 2006 as a beta version named PLoS ONE. It launched with Commenting and Note making functionality, and added the ability to rate articles in July 2007. In September 2007 the ability to leave "trackbacks" on articles was added.[4] In August 2008 it moved from a weekly publication schedule to a daily one, publishing articles as soon as they became ready.[5] In October 2008 PLoS ONE came out of "beta". Also in September 2009, as part of its Article-Level Metrics program, PLoS ONE made the full online usage data—e.g., HTMLpage views, PDF, XML downloads—for every published article publicly available. In mid-2012, as part of a rebranding of PLoS as PLOS, the journal changed its name to PLOS ONE.[6]

In 2006 the journal published 138 articles; in 2007, it published just over 1,200 articles; and in 2008, it published almost 2,800 articles, making it the largest open access journal in the world. In 2009, 4,406 articles were published, making PLOS ONE the third largest scientific journal in the world (by volume) and in 2010, 6,749 articles were published, making the journal the largest in the world (by volume).[7] In 2011, the journal published 13,798 articles,[8] meaning that approximately 1 in 60 of all articles indexed by PubMed as being published in 2011 were published by PLOS ONE,[9] In 2012 PLOS ONE published 23,468 papers.[10] In 2013, PLOS ONE published 31,500 papers.[11]

PLOS ONE is built on several conceptually different ideas compared to traditional peer-reviewed scientific publishing in that it does not use the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. The idea is that, instead, PLOS ONE only verifies whether experiments and data analysis were conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to ascertain importance, post publication, through debate and comment.[14]

“

Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLOS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating.[15]

”

According to Nature, the journal's aim is to "challenge academia's obsession with journal status and impact factors".[1] Being an online-only publication allows PLOS ONE to publish more papers than a print journal. In an effort to facilitate publication of research on topics outside, or between, traditional science categories, it does not restrict itself to a specific scientific area.[14]

Papers published in PLOS ONE can be of any length, contain full color throughout, and contain supplementary materials such as multimedia files. Reuse of articles is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License, version 2.5. In the first four years following launch, it made use of over 40,000 external peer reviewers.[16] The journal uses an international board of academic editors with over 6,000 academics handling submissions and publishes approximately 70 % of all submissions, after review by, on average, 2.9 experts.[17]

As with all journals of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE is financed by charging authors a publication fee. The "author-pays" model allows PLOS journals to provide all articles to everybody for free (i.e., open access) immediately after publication. As of July 2010, PLOS ONE charged authors US$1,350[20] to publish an article. Depending on circumstances, it may waive or reduce the fee for authors who do not have sufficient funds.[21] This model has drawn criticism, however. In 2011 Richard Poynder posited that journals such as PLoS ONE that charge authors for publication rather than charging users for access may produce a conflict of interest that reduces peer review standards (accept more articles, earn more revenue).[22]Stevan Harnad instead argues for a "no fault" peer-review model, in which authors are charged for each round of peer review, regardless of the outcome, rather than for publication.[23] PLoS had been operating at a loss until 2009 but covered its operational costs for the first time in 2010,[24] largely due to the growth of PLOS ONE.

In September 2009, PLOS ONE received the Publishing Innovation Award of the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers.[32] The award is given in recognition of a "truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication as adjudged from originality and innovative qualities, together with utility, benefit to the community and long-term prospects". In January 2010 it was announced that it was to be analyzed by Journal Citation Reports.[33] Its 2013 impact factor was 3.534.[34] Additionally, the Scopus Journal Analyzer reports a "trend line" (total citations to all articles ever published received in a year divided by total number of articles published in that year) value of 3.74 for PLOS ONE for the year 2009 (up to February 10, 2010).[35]